Advertisers frequently seek to gain the attention of the public by distributing novel, attention-getting printed media. One such media often employed by advertisers is a folded, multipanel printed display or magazine insert having an image area exceeding the nominal width of a magazine page. In many cases, advertisers desire inserts or displays having unfolded widths exceeding forty inches or more. When these inserts or displays are perforated, they may be removably bound into magazines or otherwise made to have separable portions.
Until now, such displays and inserts wider than forty inches have been expensive and difficult to produce. For example, wide inserts have been produced by feeding sheets of paper of up to 77 inches in width through a sheetfed printing press. This method is cumbersome and labor intensive as sheetfed presses typically can print only one side of a sheet at a time, thereby requiring multiple printing passes if both sides of the insert are to contain printed matter. Additionally, the sheetfed process typically requires a paper of at least 60-pound weight to provide the sheet rigidity required to successfully produce the insert. The required 60-pound weight is almost twice that required by the commonly used web printing process which also prints faster than sheetfed presses. Use of the sheetfed press therefore greatly increases production, paper and shipping costs compared to the web press.
For the reasons discussed above, the faster and cheaper web printing process would be preferred if it could be used to produce inserts of adequate width. Unfortunately, commercially available web presses produce printed webs having a maximum width of 36 to 38 inches. This limit results from both mechanical and economic factors.
In web presses presently known in the art, mechanical stability limits web width. For example, if printing cylinders begin to exceed the maximum standard 38-inch width, the mechanical stability of such printing cylinders would degrade to the point where commercially acceptable printed webs could not be produced. Furthermore, even if the cylinder stability problem could be solved, similar stability problems would have to be solved in auxiliary equipment such as splicers, perforators, folding towers and cutters. Finally, if all mechanical problems could be solved, conversion to more expensive wider web presses and auxiliary equipment would be economically infeasible for most applications.
Inherent properties of the paper used in web presses also limits web width. As water and ink is applied to the web, the paper fibers exhibit moisture-induced expansion. This expansion causes subsequently applied colors to be out of register with earlier applied colors if not corrected. For paper widths up to 38 inches, "buzzle wheels" are used to narrow the paper width, thereby bringing the edges of the paper back within an acceptable range of side register deviation. Unfortunately, applying buzzle wheel correction to wider paper widths is impractical, as the greater paper width would require the application of greater wheel forces frequently exceeding the breaking strength of the paper.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method to produce a web press-printed perforated, folded insert or display having a width exceeding the maximum web width available on the press.